Stelzer/Murray Commit LP HMS 064 Vital Weekly June 2022 As I listen to the latest collaboration (number three) between Howard Stelzer and Brendam Murray, I am contemplating the similarities and differences between both men. I met both of them years ago, Stelzer more often, and think of them as serious men with a great sense of humour. Murray is a composer who we find mostly behind the laptop, and Stelzer is the man with the Walkman, and his battered, old cassettes. Two distinct approaches when it comes to producing music with sound. Murray's results are far from the world of carefully constructed crackles and silence; he likes his drones big and fat. And that is a similarity he shares with Stelzer, who does the same thing with the sonic overload of captured field recordings. We find three pieces of music on this new album, and it fi=ounds its inspiration in the "almost forgotten period of music from the late '80s and early '90s. Think cranioclast, arcane device, Phauss, small cruel party, organum, and everything from the quiet artworks label" - not forgotten by me, though. There is a lengthy text by Stelzer on the Bandcamp page that starts with "I don’t think what I have to say would be terribly illuminating", but he has a lot of words (serious vs humour). It's about how they have no clue what they are doing or if there is a compositional idea behind this. It is all part of the subconscious world, their music-making process. For the listener, I think this is all not so relevant. What is the result like, and do I appreciate it? I believe to hear their inspirations, the good old ambient industrial drones, when ambient heated up and industrial music cooled down. Although, I must say that in this case, the music is pretty 'hot'. Maybe the current technology enables musicians to make it sound fat and dirty and, oddly perhaps, also detailed and clean. I want to think that Stelzer and Murray work back and forth so that Murray's laptop processing ends up on cassettes from Stelzer and vice versa. Thus the processes will be obscured further. It all happens in an endless free-fall of music and sound, sometimes loosely painted. Sounds appear and disappear as if they have free will, while others form the hard as a rock foundation the music is built upon. In the side-long 'The House Is Coming From Inside The Call', the music opens up, scattered sounds fly out of the window, and the dystopian feel is complete. The soundtrack for a nuclear meltdown. Excellent. - Frans de Waard